Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 160
Trim: 5¾ x 8¾
978-0-7425-2049-3 • Hardback • December 2002 • $74.00 • (£57.00)
Max Weber was the author of Economy and Society, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and other influential works. Lutz Kaelber is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Vermont.
Chapter 1 Introduction: Max Weber's Dissertation in the Context of His Early Career and Life
Chapter 2 Section I. The "Lost Decade"
Chapter 3 Section II. Ebb and Flow: Historical and Biographical Contexts of Weber's Early Career
Chapter 4 Section III. Main Themes and Arguments of The History of Commercial Partnerships
Chapter 5 Section IV. Influence of Weber's Later Writings
Chapter 6 Section V. Versions of the Text and Additional Literature
Chapter 7 Section VI. Translating The History of Commerical Partnerships
Chapter 8 Bibliography
Chapter 9 The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages
Chapter 10 Prefatory Remarks
Chapter 11 Section I. Roman and Current Law. Plan of the Investigation
Chapter 12 Section II. The Partnerships of Maritime Law
Chapter 13 Section III. Family Communities and Communities of Labor
Chapter 14 Section IV. Pisa. The Law of Partnership According to the Constitutum Usus
Chapter 15 Section V. Florence
Chapter 16 Section VI. The Legal Literature. Conclusion
Chapter 17 Appendix: Overview of the Documents
The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages is of crucial importance today.
— The Chronicle of Higher Education
Social scientists in all fields and historians of modern business culture, as well as social theorists and Weber scholars, will finally be able to put Weber's more famous writings on modern economies and societies in historical perspective. This book shows for the first time that the roots of the modern business firm are even deeper in history than the story told in Weber's best-selling work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. For years to come, readers of all kinds will thank Kaelber for making Weber's ideas more accessible.
— Charles Lemert, University Professor of Social Theory, Emeritus, Wesleyan University
Lutz Kaelber has performed a service by translating and annotating this important product of Weber's scholarly apprenticeship. Written in the peculiar staccato of historical legal writing of the time—a period in which legal history was at its peak—the text deals with a crucial problem in the rise of western capitalism: the step-by-step creation of a legal structure (a form of liability for debt suitable for capitalist enterprise) out of a legal tradition oriented to the economic unit of the productive household.
— University of South Florida, Stephen Turner,
Affords specialists access to an underappreciated aspect of Weber's analysis of early capitalism.
— Contemporary Sociology
Weber's extraordinary dissertation, defended when he was 25, is a minor masterpiece, which surely makes this book the most important translation event for Weberians in the last quarter century. Kaelber's lengthy introduction is indispensable, and corrects a number of longstanding errors in the literature. Everyone who cherishes the Weberian legacy is in his debt. Historical economists, social theorists, intellectual historians, and historians of higher education will want to own this volume.
— Alan Sica, The Pennsylvania State University